Ask An SEO Expert – Site Personalization

A really great website is one that delivers a specially personalized user experience. Google knows this and is working to personalize its search engine results. The more your content caters to the user searching for a solution you provide, the more likely Google is going to drive traffic to your site.

In this week’s Ask An SEO Expert, Jesse Laffen outlines four points to keep in mind when personalizing your site to ensure no harm is done to your SEO efforts.

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Here’s a question from Michelle: “As a site is developed to deliver apersonalized experience, what steps should be taken to ensure there is notharm done from a SEO perspective?”

This is a really kind of nuanced question. It’s a really, really good one.There are a lot of reasons to want to personalize your pages, right? Googledoes it all the time. They’re showing me plus results. They’re showing me things that they think my friends like. They know that I’m searching from acertain area in the country, and they want to make sure that those resultsare relevant to me.

Over time Google has pushed more and more to get personalized results. It’sbecause it’s a better experience. People want things and want informationthat is germane to them and what they’re looking for right now. Socertainly, a great step to take.

The first point here is the risk/reward. The risk that you run doing thisis that Google and other search engines have always been a little hesitantof trusting sites that are trying to show different content between a userand a search engine. The reason they do that is because they want tounderstand that whatever their search engine spider sees in indexes is whatthey’re actually showing to their end user. It makes a lot of sense. If Ishow up and try to sell you a Corvette and you get there and it’s a Pinto,you’re going to be like, “What’s going on, Jesse? Why did you do that?”

They’re kind of the same way. They’ve always been a little distrustful ofthat. It’s a practice called cloaking. There’s kind of another side to thistoo, though, where certain innovations in web technology are actually much,much better for the user. What happens is Google and Bing and other searchengines try to index and understand more and more content so that they cancatch up to that really, really good user experience.

I have to believe that this, given Google’s preference to personalize theirown results, definitely measures or hits that threshold of this issomething that is going on, on the Web, that we really, really want tounderstand. I think, overall, there’s probably not a ton of risk here, butthere is a little bit, because you are essentially possibly showing twodifferent things to two different people and maybe another thing entirelyto a search engine.

In order to minimize that risk, which is point number two here, try not toshow radically different pages on the same URLs to two different viewers.If somebody comes and they say, “Oh, I’m really, really interested ingiraffes,” don’t serve up a page about horses. That just doesn’t makesense. Search engines are really, really good at understanding patterns.That’s kind of what they do. Make sure that you compartmentalize thedifference in the content that you are actually showing, if at allpossible.

If I’m a search engine and I see a million pages, and they all look kind ofthe same except for this part over here that’s being changed based onpreference, that’s one thing. If all of the content on the entire page isalways different, then that’s something entirely different. If I’m a searchengine, I probably don’t really trust the latter page, whereas the former,I can start to kind of understand and pick apart. That’s probably a goodthing.

Number three here, if you are actually using some sort of tracking ID ordynamic URL or just changing URLs with alike content, make sure that youcan canonicalize it back to one source. That’s just a real easy way to showthe search engine, yeah, we understand that there’s duplicate content here,but it’s okay, because here’s where the home of it is, and we had reallygood reason to do that. Search engines like it because they can show up andsay, “All right, I don’t have to worry about storing these vast amounts ofsimilar content, because you’ve already shown me exactly what I need toserve up in my search results.”

Step number four, specify static pages in a sitemap. If you are going tochange a lot of the content on the pages or if you’re going to serve updifferent URLs with different content on them, make sure that you’reserving up a really nice, easy to understand XML sitemap for a searchengine to kind of parse and understand, okay, these are the places where Ican go to find these original sources of content.

On the whole, I think that as long as you kind of minimize exactly how muchinformation you’re showing and really, really focus on your user, it’s hardto go wrong by a search engine, because they want to return great pages allthe time. Personalize pages, usually really good for users as long asyou’re doing it well. I can’t imagine that a search engine would have areally big problem with it. Just make sure that you’re careful to kind oflet them know what’s going on as much as you can.

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Comments: 3

Great video. As personalized search is evolving, so should be our SEO efforts. We need to focus more on enhancing users experience. More of our attention should be put on creating fresh, relevant and socially likable content.

Its a good point. We have been using http://www.cognesia.com to automatically personalise landing pages based on keywords. Therefore when someone clicks in from a brand term we serve different content to someone coming in under other specific terms. This has allowed us to reduce the bounce rate from 26% to less than 12% as the landing page is far more relevant to the user. Although we are aware Google might not like this we have not seen any noticeable drop in engine traffic as we only update the content images and to some extent the text in certain places. However its all leading us on the right direction.